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I've translated Malcolm Kesson's Cellular Automata SL into a Houdini VOP RSL Network (no reason). You can find the original SL on his website: http://www.fundza.com/rman_shaders/cellular/index.html
Main difference is that Houdini VOPs don't support Arrays so I used multiple connections and 8 texture calls instead of a for loop. Let me know if there is some better way of querying neigbours.
Original shader cell size and count is dependant on micropolgyons and controlled by shading rate. I've set the shading rate to a very high value and the cell count is controlled by geometric subdivision instead. That meant I couldn't use random function for initialization so I replaced it with cellnoise shadeop.

OTL library contains digital assets:

cellular - Object type digital asset

bake3d - shadeop for pointcloud baking

texture3D - shadeop for pointcloud reading

cellnoise - rendermans cellnoise function

cellular_automata - cellular.sl VOP node version. Just a direct implementation of the code. Not used for anything.

Cellular is Object Type Digital Asset that contains shaders, geometry and ROPs for 'out of the box' test.

I started playing with fractal shaders and in particularity I wanted to reproduce romanesco broccoli in SL. At first it was just a simple experiment but after each obstacle I got more persistent so eventually I discovered the world of calculus.
I'm going to skip the theory part about phyllotaxis, Fibonacci etc and get straight to the shader math. Good site that explains it all is: http://www.math.smith.edu/phyllo/

Most of the math was found on Wolfram and WikiPedia pages

First off we need to convert our UVs from cartesian to polar coordinate system

There is still some room for optimization in fragment shader. I feel like, I'm doing too many space transformations at the end. Also, I couldn't figure out how to access gl_ModelViewMatrixInverse in vertex shader so modelViewMatrix gets inverted in the vertex shader. Recalculating normals of displaced vertices is also questionable. I'm planning to add cat eye shape and caustics.

Environments from hdrlabs.com and zbyg.deviantart.com
Eye textures from milesresearch.com and Lukas Hajka